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The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing: For writers, editors, and speakers was first published in 1980 by Casey Miller and Kate Swift. [1] It was the second book produced by the two in an effort to raise awareness of issues concerning gender in the English language.
The first section of the handbook is entitled "Man as a False Generic." False generics are defined as "terms used of a class or group that are not applicable to all its members." [2] A brief history of the subject describes the origin of 'man' to mean "person" or "human being," but observes that this broad definition of 'man' was becoming questionable in the 1980s. "Because gender in modern English corresponds to sex or its absence, native speakers of the language increasingly sense the same contradiction in calling women 'men' that they would feel in calling girls 'boys' or daughters 'sons.'" [3]
They give the following as an example for where the generic use of 'man' is not applicable: "One author, ostensibly generalizing about all human beings, wrote: 'As for man, he is no different from the rest. His back aches, he ruptures easily, his women have difficulties in childbirth...' If man and he were truly generic, the parallel phrase would have been "he has difficulties in childbirth." [4]
Swift and Miller offer a list of substitute titles for words including man such as 'salesman' or 'fisherman.' They also suggest using synonyms for words that refer to gender, such as 'man the station,' and so on.
This section goes into detail about the history and problems that arise from using male pronouns as generic pronouns (i.e. "he," "him," and "his"). They offer this section from a New York Times response to an article in support of gendered pronouns to be used generically:
"Knowing that he and his can be gender neutral, I shall no longer feel there is an odd image filtering through something like: 'The average American needs the small routines of getting ready for work. As he shaves or blow-dries his hair or pulls on his panty hose, he is easing himself by small stages into the demands of the day.'...How liberating common sense can be." [5]
As a solution to this issue of pronouns, Swift and Miller suggest using 'they' in place of a gendered pronoun, or specifically stating "he or she/his or hers" as a substitute for just the male pronoun.
The 'Generalizations' section describes the reverse of the 'Pronoun Problem' - it is when gender neutral terms are assumed to be gender specific. Often, the gender assumed is male. This section also describes problems with the use of female-gendered words in ways that are condescending, but may not be intentional. As an example, they offer this statement about a fictional television show: "Powerful lady attorney and confident young lawyer team up to defend a wealthy contractor accused of murder."
Using "lady" in this way implies that the 'confident young lawyer' and the 'wealthy contractor' are both male, and also suggests that a woman needs to be explicitly described as powerful. They go on to urge that qualifiers not be used with just women, and instead suggest that the above statement read:
"Powerful attorney and her young male colleague team up to defend a wealthy businessman accused of murder." [6]
The Handbook includes suggestions on how to avoid sexist language. The recurring theme is using inclusive language that is not gender biased. Miller and Swift offer a historical account of how language norms have developed in the English language, and then suggest alternatives that do not make gender assumptions.
"A Few More Words" is a chapter that includes in depth case studies on specific words such as "Feminist," "Hero/Heroine," and "Midwife." These sections offer a detailed history of specific words and phrases, and put them in gendered context. [7]
The Handbook also contains a brief thesaurus of terms to use in place of terms that are not gender neutral. Examples include 'married woman' instead of 'matron' and 'person/individual' instead of 'man' when meant to mean "person." [8]
Casey Miller and Kate Swift have been advocating for gender-inclusive language since the early 1970s, when they wrote the essay, "Desexing the English Language." Their intent in The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing was "to give people the background, to make them aware of what was happening right underneath their noses...we didn’t want to tell people, Do This or Don’t Do That!” Due in large part to their work on the topic, by 1980 when The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing was written the movement supporting non-sexist language was gaining traction.
Nearly 20 years after its publication, the Handbook was still considered the standard reference book on how to avoid degrading women with words. [9] It is used as an example of unbiased review on the topic of gendered and sexist language.
Singular they, along with its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs and themselves, is an epicene (gender-neutral) third-person pronoun. It typically occurs with an unspecified antecedent, in sentences such as:
Womyn is one of several alternative political spellings of the English word women, used by some feminists. There are other spellings, including womban or womon (singular), and wombyn or wimmin (plural). Some writers who use such alternative spellings, avoiding the suffix "-man" or "-men", see them as an expression of female independence and a repudiation of traditions that define women by reference to a male norm. Recently, the term womxn has been used by intersectional feminists to indicate the same ideas while foregrounding or more explicitly including transgender women and women of color.
Gender-neutral language is language that minimizes assumptions about the social gender or biological sex of people referred to in speech or writing. In contrast to most other Indo-European languages, English does not retain grammatical gender and most of its nouns, adjectives and pronouns are therefore not gender-specific. In most other Indo-European languages, nouns are grammatically masculine or grammatically feminine, or sometimes grammatically neuter, regardless of the actual gender of the referent.
A third-person pronoun is a pronoun that refers to an entity other than the speaker or listener. Some languages with gender-specific pronouns have them as part of a grammatical gender system, a system of agreement where most or all nouns have a value for this grammatical category. A few languages with gender-specific pronouns, such as English, Esperanto, Afrikaans, Defaka, Khmu, Malayalam, Tamil, and Yazgulyam, lack grammatical gender; in such languages, gender usually adheres to "natural gender", which is often based on biological gender. Other languages, including most Austronesian languages, lack gender distinctions in personal pronouns entirely, as well as any system of grammatical gender.
A gender-specific job title is a name of a job that also specifies or implies the gender of the person performing that job. For example, in English, the job title stewardess implies that the person is female. A gender-neutral job title, on the other hand, is one that does not specify or imply gender, such as firefighter or lawyer. In some cases it may be debatable whether a title is gender-specific; for example, chairman appears to denote a male, but the title is also applied sometimes to women.
Androcentrism is the practice, conscious or otherwise, of placing a masculine point of view at the center of one's world view, culture, and history, thereby culturally marginalizing femininity. The related adjective is androcentric, while the practice of placing the feminine point of view at the center is gynocentric.
Gender asymmetry is an aspect of the constructed international auxiliary language Esperanto which has been challenged by numerous proposals seeking to regularize both grammatical and lexical gender.
The Englishpersonal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and natural gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and Middle English.
Epicenity is the lack of gender distinction, often reducing the emphasis on the masculine to allow the feminine. It includes androgyny – having both masculine and feminine characteristics. The adjective gender-neutral may describe epicenity.
Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person, second person, or third person. Personal pronouns may also take different forms depending on number, grammatical or natural gender, case, and formality. The term "personal" is used here purely to signify the grammatical sense; personal pronouns are not limited to people and can also refer to animals and objects.
The chairperson is the presiding officer of an organized group such as a board, committee, or deliberative assembly. The person holding the office, who is typically elected or appointed by members of the group, presides over meetings of the group, and conducts the group's business in an orderly fashion.
Gender-neutral language or gender-inclusive language is language that avoids bias towards a particular sex or social gender. In English, this includes use of nouns that are not gender-specific to refer to roles or professions, formation of phrases in a coequal manner, and discontinuing the blanket use of male or female terms. For example, the words policeman and stewardess are gender-specific job titles; the corresponding gender-neutral terms are police officer and flight attendant. Other gender-specific terms, such as actor and actress, may be replaced by the originally male term; for example, actor used regardless of gender. Some terms, such as chairman, that contain the component -man but have traditionally been used to refer to persons regardless of sex are now seen by some as gender-specific. An example of forming phrases in a coequal manner would be using husband and wife instead of man and wife. Examples of discontinuing the blanket use of male terms in English are referring to those with unknown or indeterminate gender as singular they, and using humans, people, or humankind, instead of man or mankind.
Gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender is the usage of wording that is balanced in its treatment of the genders in a non-grammatical sense. For example, advocates of gender-neutral language challenge the traditional use of masculine nouns and pronouns when referring to two or more genders or to a person of an unknown gender in most Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages. This stance is often inspired by feminist ideas about gender equality. Gender neutrality is also used colloquially when one wishes to be inclusive of people who identify as non-binary genders or as genderless.
A genderless language is a natural or constructed language that has no distinctions of grammatical gender—that is, no categories requiring morphological agreement between nouns and associated pronouns, adjectives, articles, or verbs.
Generic antecedents are representatives of classes, referred to in ordinary language by another word, in a situation in which gender is typically unknown or irrelevant. These mostly arise in generalizations and are particularly common in abstract, theoretical or strategic discourse. Examples include "readers of Wikipedia appreciate their encyclopedia," "the customerwho spends in this market."
A system of grammatical gender, whereby every noun was treated as either masculine, feminine, or neuter, existed in Old English, but fell out of use during the Middle English period; therefore, Modern English largely does not have grammatical gender. Modern English lacks grammatical gender in the sense of all noun classes requiring masculine, feminine, or neuter inflection or agreement; however, it does retain features relating to natural gender with particular nouns and pronouns to refer specifically to persons or animals of one or other sexes and neuter pronouns for sexless objects. Also, in some cases, feminine pronouns are used by some speakers when referring to ships, to churches, and to nation states and islands.
Gender in Bible translation concerns various issues, such as the gender of God and generic antecedents in reference to people. Bruce Metzger states that the English language is so biased towards the male gender that it restricts and obscures the meaning of the original language, which was more gender-inclusive than a literal translation would convey. Wayne Grudem disagrees, believing that a translation should try to match the words of the original language rather than introduce the translator's opinion as to whether the original words meant to include both sexes or not, and that trying to be gender-neutral results in vague and contorted writing style. Michael Marlowe argues from a third standpoint, that the Bible is patriarchal, and gender-neutral language distorts its meaning in an attempt by translators like Metzger to impose their progressive modern views on the text. The topic has theological and political undercurrents. Paul Mankowski says that inclusive-language translators are bowing to feminist political taboos rather than trying to translate accurately, while Marmy Clason says that their opponents are motivated by hostility to feminism rather than fidelity to the original meaning.
Kate Swift was an American feminist writer and editor who co-wrote influential books and articles about sexism in the English language. Their early works included the Ms. Magazine article "Desexing the Language" (1971), and the New York Times Magazine piece "One Small Step for Genkind" (1972). The latter grew into the book Words and Women: A New Language in New Times. In 1980, they followed with The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing.
Casey Geddes Miller was an American feminist author and editor best known for promoting the use of non-sexist writing in the English language. Along with her writing partner, Kate Swift, Miller authored The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing and Words and Women.
Feminist language reform or feminist language planning refers to the effort, often of political and grassroots movements, to change how language is used to gender people, activities and ideas on an individual and societal level. This initiative has been adopted in countries such as Sweden, Switzerland and Australia, and has not been linked to higher gender equality.